Project plan

an astonishing house frame

my friend malcolm cooper and i took a little 20 mile ride up the valley to middletown springs a couple of weeks ago. we were on a mission to get some barnboards from our friend dan mckeen for a project in malcolms store, at j.k.adams in dorset. well, we got the barnboards and a tour of a truly amazing piece of woodworking ... dan is a timber frame specialist, known for salvaging and restoring hand hewn frames ... after 35 years or so of it, even he was a little amazed by this one ... im sure i dont remember the whole conversation, so my facts may be a little off, but i think i got the gist of it ... click the photos to enlarge them ... cool story ..
a friend of dans contacted him to offer him a house that he had purchased. he was going to tear it down and build something new and modern on the site and thought dan might be interested.
it was billed as the oldest standing house in danby, and, under the siding, it was a beauty ... in the top photo, you can see the 1795 date scribed onto one of the timbers and i believe it ... dan, i think, referred to it as dutch style with full length, dovetailed logs on the first floor and a chestnut post and beam upper floor and roof structure ...
from the spacing of the rafters, dan has speculated that it was to be a fine residence, with the roof framed on 24" centers, much closer than normal at that time, probably to support the weight of a locally fabricated slate roof.
interesting rafter to plate joint that i have never seen before ... on the lower floor, it appears that the logs were full length when dovetailed and scribed together and then the windows and doors were cut out after the fact ... dan says there are substantial wood pegs every so often on each log that were inserted as the logs were stacked and he just put them back in there as he went ...
beautiful!
heres an inside shot of the angled window cuts and little bit of the accordion lathe and plaster tracks.
also on the same site was an angled wall corn crib with heavy angled framing that was disassembled and attached, in the end, to the main house when dan reerected below, for storage and display at his shop ...
i dont remember the reason for the angles of the walls on corncribs, but i know there is one ... actually heres something from wikipedia about it ...
lookin good once it was cleaned up ..
the angled dovetailed cross beams ...
and now the reassembly ... as dan tells it, there was some rot at the ground level so he started by laying a level 286" x 36 hemlock frame and thenstacked the frame up a log at a time
lincoln logs for sure
then the purlins and roof framing
and the roof boards ...
and the corn crib ...
its ready to be taken down and reassembled on your site, which i think should be a museum or public space of some kind, as an unbelievable example of extremely uncommon and fantastic hand hewn carpentry ...
contact dan for more info .... get yourself a piece of history ...